[nickjohnson] sent in today’s hack. Mike removed the extraneous hardware, just leaving the UART on this IBM PCMCIA modem and replaced it with a SMD MAX241 ttl-rs232 converter. He added a new end to the original cable and ended up with a nice, finished PCMCIA serial port. That fine SMD soldering is hard to do. Impressive work.
Peripherals Hacks1562 Articles
Environmental Monitoring
[Daniel Klien] sent me his thermd environmental monitoring project. It’s written in perl, but the cool part is the sheer number of supported devices. It’s pretty rare when a single developer is given test hardware so he can add support for it.
Sure, this isn’t a hardware hack, but temperature logging is one of those irritating problems of hardware hacking. I’ve got loads of uses for it – coffee roasting, house management, battery charging, monitoring for my EV motorcycle project.
DIY Audio Interconnects
This is one of those things that has annoyed me for so long, that I’m putting it up. I have despised, no, I have friggin loathed the quality of 1/8″ (3.5mm) cables. Cables are pretty easy; just clip, strip and solder away, right? Right. If you grew up cursed with the junk that rat shack carries, you know my pain. So, if you hate those crappy cables as much as I do, go check out this lovely little write up on making quality interconnects. (Now if I could just find a 2.5mm connector like that switchcraft 3.5mm to fix this spare apple power supply)
Tableless Optical Mouse
soap caught my attention. It’s on of those hacks that strikes me as well concieved – insert a wireless optical mouse inside a smooth plastic container and wrap it in fabric. The fabric covering becomes the mouse surface. (Just don’t attack me because the creator works for Billy.)
[Comments will be back soon.]
Diy Midi Keyboard
Barry Carter put together a how to on building your own USB midi keyboard. He used the discontinued (read cheap) AN2131 developer board and a cheap toy keyboard. The keys are rewired with a diode based keyboard matrix that connects easily to the dev board. He rounds out the write up with some source code.
Ultrasonic 3d Mouse
Shane brennan sent in his groups final CE/EE senior design project. fre3space is an ir, ultrasonic 3d mouse. Three towers take ultrasonic sound measurements to calculate the position of the mouse. button clicks are transmitted in ir. A fpga developers kit ties it all together and provides the usb interface. a simple opengl application demonstrates the 3d capabilities of the system (vs 2d of the desktop variety).
Palm Morse Code Keyboard
[Tom] was looking for a standard USB interface for a Palm folding keyboard when he stumbled across this Morse code adapter (cache) from 2004. Palm keyboards use a serial connection to talk to the PDA. Since they are low-power and compact, they’re a good choice for ham radio applications. The site has pictures, schematics and PIC code to make the Morse code keyboard.
